House, Senate resume budget negotiations

Legislative negotiations over trimming Kansas’ current budget resumed Tuesday, with state senators offering a new proposal to end an impasse with the House over how to boost funding for public schools’ special education programs while still meeting Gov. Sam Brownback’s goal of reducing overall spending.

Three senators and three House members met briefly after not meeting last week or Monday. They are supposed to draft a final, compromise version of a bill revising the current budget, but their work has stalled over special education spending.

The U.S. Department of Education is demanding that Kansas increase its current spending by $26 million or face losing the same amount of money each year, starting with the fiscal year that begins July 1. Brownback and legislators want to prevent the loss of federal funds, but the governor also is keen to reduce the current budget.

House members had pushed a plan to divert the money to special education from schools’ base state aid per student, a move senators opposed because the base aid already would be cut under Brownback’s recommendations. Senators instead proposed an accounting move — delaying a state contribution to the pension fund for teachers and government workers — to push the burden into the next fiscal year.

Senators still want to delay the pension payment, but, to deal with House members’ insistence on a reduction in overall spending, they proposed a series of new cuts to both the current and next fiscal year’s budgets. The biggest cut would be the elimination of $10 million in longevity bonuses for state employees in the next fiscal year.

Senate Ways and Means Committee Chairwoman Carolyn McGinn, a Sedgwick Republican and her chamber’s lead negotiator, said she is hoping lawmakers can send the budget bill to Brownback this week. The governor had wanted lawmakers to send him the bill before February.

“We heard a lot of people say that they didn’t want new spending,” she said. “We went and found the money, so I’m hoping that we’re going to have some forward progress.”

But House Appropriations Committee Chairman Marc Rhoades, a Newton Republican who is his chamber’s lead negotiator, remained skeptical because senators still want to push part of the special education funding burden into the next fiscal year.

“They made us an offer, which is great,” he said.

The negotiations resumed as both the Senate and House budget committees planned to discuss state spending on public schools for the next fiscal year. The Senate Ways and Means Committee was taking up the topic Tuesday, and the House Appropriations Committee will discuss the issue Wednesday.

Brownback had endorsed the House’s proposal for resolving the special education funding issue in the current budget, and his aides hadn’t seen the latest Senate proposal.

The governor wanted to trim about $38 million from the current state budget, leaving cash reserves of about $35 million at the end of June. The state could then roll the savings and the cash reserves into the next fiscal year, helping to reduce its projected $493 million budget shortfall.

But special education funding has complicated the debate. The House didn’t originally include any extra special education dollars in its version of the budget bill, which met Brownback’s target for spending cuts. The Senate included the money, but its version of the bill would have left cash reserves of less than $3 million.

The senators’ plan to delay a $69 million pension payment from mid-April until after July 1 would have freed up funds to add money for special education while leaving cash reserves of $83 million at the end of June though the reserves would have immediately disappeared once the new fiscal year began.

But the House members’ plan would have cut base state aid $40 per student, on top of the $232 per student that Brownback already has proposed — making the total decline almost 7 percent and dropping the figure from $4,012 per student to $3,740. School districts are already worried about having to lay off personnel this spring.

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Again, the schools are crying, bad Governor! If they are so worried about having to lay off good teachers, why are they rushing to sign big contracts with higher administrative personnel, when they know the cuts are coming? Most Districts have too many pyramids of administrators and we all know they are the highest paid part of education. Those crying the loudest are generally taking home the BIGGEST paycheck. Send our tax dollars to the children via teachers. Not to some administrator behind a desk who has an assistant, who in turn has an assistant, who also has an assistant...well you get the drift. I am tired of my tax dollars going to some of these "contract" people. There are contracts that end up paying these people close to $100,000 a year for years after they are gone!
I am VERY sorry that good teachers may lose jobs with the budget cuts, but they need to go blame their greedy bosses not the Governor or the Legislators.
Another way for schools to cut some spending is to cut out a game/match or two from each sport or extracurricular activity. The students traveling in buses/SUV's all over Kansas for competition is not cheap either.

How can the federal government take away $26 million in special ed funds when in 2009 they only sent $13.7 million to Kansas? As I explain at larson4liberty.com the real problem here is that Governor Brownback is eager to maintain the state's dependency on federal education funds. I also note that the state got $195 million in extra "other spending" education funds in 2009, that did not go to any specific program. Where did it go? Did your kid's education improve so much in 2009 that it was worth expanding Kansas' dependency on federal education funds by 200 percent? Get these details and more at larson4liberty.com.